WARMTH LIKE HOME UNAWARES

Before I start talking about Sonic, I wanna say that my brother got married on Saturday :D Two days ago. I was the best man, and being injured, it was very hard, but overall I think it was a great wedding and a good experience. I was honestly expecting to be miserable the whole time but it was quite pleasant. He and his wife seem super happy and I've very happy for them both. I got to see some family I haven't seen in a very long time, including my cousin I haven't seen in like probably 20 years who is really cool. I also met a lot of my now-sister-in-law's (er that's how it works, right?) family and friends and they were all great too. I have a lot of weird stories, but I'm tired of telling them at this point hahaha.

sooo SONIC lol

I started up Sonic Frontiers last night. I had played it before a it on PS5, and actually got further than I got last night, but I kinda forgot a bit about it, so I'm trying again on PC version. I am having a blast and other than enemies being a little tedious to defeat sometimes (you have the strat down but they have a lot of HP and you gotta wait between their long attacks or whatever) I have no complaints.

I've heard people complain that the open world is nothing more than just little springs and grind rails that automatically get items for you. I do think this is mostly true, though there are puzzles scattered around too (you have to do a puzzle or some kind of little task for each spot that opens up more of your map, though some of them are barely more than step on a button that's right in front of you on a pedestal haha). But I feel like in any other open world game, the items would just be sitting there on the ground and you'd just harvest them or whatever, so in this, at least you're getting to see Sonic go flying all around, and some times you do have to maneuver a little to get the items. There are also bigger puzzles and things, and boss enemies scattered about. It does feel vast but not necessarily 'empty' to me. But I am not much of an open world person so I don't have a lot to compare it to.

Actually, I always say I don't like open world games, but every time I play one, I'm like "but this one does it well" (except Scarlet and Violet) so maybe I just like them...? LOL

As I go, I'm learning more abilities that make the combat more interesting. I thought I was going to learn Lightspeed Dash somehow from story progression, but it is just mapped to L3, which is super weird. You can change it, but there's also a lot more button mappings now because of the combat, so I don't want to mess it up at this point and create mappings that are even worse haha. But I left an item WAYYY back somewhere because I thought I was going to get this ability later, and now I gotta travel back XD

Instead of fast travel, when you unlock the map-opening waypoint thingies, they make like a huge chain of grind rails so you can just grind to the places you've been. It takes a while, especially if you have to go far, but honestly I just like watching that stuff, so I don't mind, but I could easily see this getting frustrating later if you want to get somewhere far away quickly just to pick up one little thing. (Then you gotta go back, too!)

One thing that is helpful for me is EVERYTHING is marked on the map, and disappears or gets checked off when you pick it up or whatever. Well, not every last thing, as there are these purple coins that seem similar to the purple coins from Super Mario Odyssey, so I'm a little worried those are going to become a pain later, too.

The action stages have been good so far. I've only played... four or five of them, and not in numbered order, either. The difficulty is a bit... all over the place, at least for getting the S ranks (for just clearing them, it's been very easy so far. Even finding the red star rings hasn't been hard at all, and I've found them all on my first trip through without much effort.

A couple of the S ranks took me a LONG time, and I really had to route well and then play well to get them. I was doing one for like 30-45 minutes straight (the stages are only like 2 minutes long at most) and finally only got it by like half a second. Another one didn't take as long to master as the stage was shorter and simpler, but I still was only able to get the S rank by 0.1 seconds. And I felt like I was playing PERFECTLY.

But then there was another that I was just slowly inching through and being careful so I could get lots of rings and find the red star rings on my first play of the stage... and I missed the time by only 1 second??? Then I played through again and made plenty of mistakes and still beat the S rank time by like 15 seconds. Very strange. The other one or two I played I remember only taking a couple tries to get and I don't feel like I had to play as strictly as the two hard ones.

So as for the story, which I've been talking about Sonic story in my other Sonic posts, it hasn't developed too much yet, but I'm enjoying it. The game seems to take place over a few islands, and each one features a different character who is like the co-star alongside Sonic. The first island has Amy, which is great, because I love Amy. And there's something about cyberspace and Eggman is stuck in there, and Sonic can go in and out, and Sonic's friends seem like... trapped in-between? It's not really clear what all of this is yet haha. Sonic is also some kind of 'key' (Buffyverse crossover?!) but don't know what that means either hahaha. And this like small pedobait character is trying to kill him for whatever reason hahaha.

The whole thing is supposed to feel very mysterious, so there's a lot I don't really understand, but I think it's meant to be that way (I mean, the characters don't understand what's going on either), and I am intrigued to learn more. I did read a little bit about the development of the game because a while back I learned that Lost World's script was originally written in English, despite the game being developed in Japan. So I wanted to know if this was the same for Frontiers, and it seems that it is! I ended up asking on reddit and it seems pretty much all the games from 2010 onward were written in English first. So I wanted to play all the games in Japanese, but because I like playing games in their original language if possible. But since English is the original... I should do that, right? But it seems weird like... doing old games in Japanese and new ones in English...??? It also seems like there is a separate Japanese canon and English canon, and the newer games are localized/adapted into Japanese to suit the Japanese canon better. So there are actually some changes made to make the stories different. Maybe I should play all the games twice?!

Er, anyway, my point was I looked up about the development, and it seems the story for Frontiers was intended to be mysterious and have a darker and more mature atmosphere and storyline, rather than being family-friendly and putting kids first. Though honestly I feel like most Sonic games have pretty dark storylines already... but I do think the storytelling is more mature, things being a bit more complex and developing slowly, and the way the cinematics are handled and stuff. Might not keep a kid's attention as easily.

The graphics seem... kind of bad? Even on high settings? Well some stuff looks really nice, but the game started with a rainy scene and the effect of the rain hitting Sonic looked awful. It looked like glitchy static or something lol. I actually thought I was getting a graphical bug or something, that's how weird it looked. Other parts look fine, but often, especially in close-ups, characters seem way too under-detailed and it looks like it's a much older game than one from 4 years ago. But it's also Sonic, like... the designs themselves do not have much detail, and it would be weird if they made him like hairy or something? I don't want him to look like movie!Sonic. Also there is pop-in of a lot of things because the world is big and a lot of things are quite a distance away, but sometimes you need to be able to see things from afar to puzzle out how to get to certain locations, but entire platforms and stuff will only pop-in if you move close enough, so if you're not standing in the right place, you could think nothing is up there...??? I guess I do have another complaint hahaha.

Anyway, my time with the game so far has been very fun overall. I really love the action stages, but I also really love just running around the world and seeing what little things I find, even if a lot of it is somewhat useless (like just rings or the Amy memory thingies which you get more than enough of and can even farm them from certain enemies or cyloop, so they're not even unique and you don't even need to find the ones that are uniquely placed). When I get into the 'zone' of doing either action stages or exploring the world, I don't want to go to the other because I'm having too much fun with one mood, but then when I do transition I have so much fun with the other hahaha. It is nice because if you do start to get tired of one style of gameplay, you can just switch to the other. As long as you have action stages to unlock, of course. You do have to find these gear things to unlock them, which you do have to fight bosses to obtain, and fighting the bosses so far is my least favorite part lol. I have found a couple gears lying around but I'm pretty sure the main source of them is bosses, as the game was really pushing that.

The game seems like it's going to continue opening up -- I'll unlock new abilities and mechanics and fight even more interesting enemies (at least I hope about the latter) . Apparently there is fishing (???) so I'm looking forward to that, too. And learn more about the story as well. I was looking at the achievements list in order of how many people have gotten them, and it seems the 'fish for the first time' is the next most common after 'clear the first island' one. The one for seeing everything on the first island comes later in the list, so I will probably do that before moving on to the next island, so might be some time before I can fish XD The name of the fishing achievement is even 'Big (something)' so I'm hoping Big the Cat is in the game?!

But yeah, I'm itching to play more but I stay with Dens in the morning so I gotta wait a few more hours XD

Oh, I guess I'll talk about this here, I also started a game called Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch and I'm enjoying that, too. It's also open world, but the point of the world seems to be just to collect materials for building things, and I can already tell it's going to get super tedious. It's good for a horsey game... or rather a better way to word it is that it's not AS terrible as other horsey games. It feels clunky often and the gameplay loops is already a little frustrating as it takes forever to do things and it makes you ride SO FAR to do anything, with just little generic mats all over the ground, so very little to 'explore.'

I played another one that ended up just being awful shovelware, and it was actually pretty funny how bad and weird it was. And I also started Rival Stars again which is nice but it's basically just menus. I also played a Barbie horse mobile game a while back and it was actually really good? If it wasn't a crappy mobile game with sort-of disguised gacha and other dumb stuff, and fleshed out to be a bigger world and game not limited by those things, it might actually be the best horse game I've played hahaha.

I don't really have any particular affinity or interest in horses, but I do like stuff like breeding, care, and competing with your pets, whether it's monster creatures or Chao from Sonic or just real animals like horses or dogs. Horse games tend to cater to that kind of gameplay, so they're fun for me for those reasons. Rival Stars has a cool breeding system with tons of mechanics, but the RNG for stats passing down is abysmal and the game makes you wait on timers (even the paid PC version) to breed, so it's VERY frusrtating. Emerald Valley does seem to have breeding as well, but I haven't learned how to do it yet. I can't even figure out how to give the horses a bath lol. But they at least get clean if I wade in circles in water for a while lol.

One thing I enjoy about Emerald Valley is that when you befriend a horse, it has various personality traits, and some can be negative, like being afraid of high places, or being too lazy to jump, but you can overcome them and 'delete' the traits by taking care of the horse in certain ways. For the jumping, you just jump a lot, but for the fear, you take your horse to that kind of location, and then pet and comfort it with a minigame while you're there, and it helps it be more calm. Do this in enough unique scary place, and it will overcome its fear. Pretty neat.

Overall it does seem to have a variety of mechanics and things to think about, like with petting, each horse likes to be pet a different way, and each has favorite foods and you can feed the horse too little or too much and it causes problems, and you also built facilities all over a big ranch, but you're still limited in size, and different facilities contribute to different things, so you have to choose if you want to plant crops that help keep your ranch's feed stock up (to help boost your max number of horses), or plant crops that are more for direct feeding to individual horses to help in your exploration and races. Do you have more pastures or more stables? Stuff like that.

It doesn't seem super well-balanced but it functions decently enough that I don't get bored while playing. Not sure if that will keep up (I think I played like 4 hours total) but it's nice so far.

This morning I had a virutal appointment with my therapist, and I normally get a link through email ahead of time. It was about 10 minutes before the appointment and I still hadn't received the link, but when I looked at my inbox, I noticed I hadn't gotten an email in 6 days. I get so much random spam (mostly stuff I opted into but can't be bothered to unsub from) and a lot of it does come to my main inbox, so I was a bit surprised.

I remembered several days ago I had started using Betterbird on my laptop, so I was wondering if somehow this messed up my actual outlook account, even though that really wouldn't make sense, but I was getting paranoid, so I was scrambling to install Betterbird on the PC, but I have like 80,000 emails because I never sort through them or delete them, and it was taking too long to actually load all the emails, so I was kind of panicking hahaha.

Wile I was staring at the loading bar and watching it move one pixel every now and then as it tried to cram all the emails into Betterbird, I got a notification on my phone that I had a new email, and there it was, visible from my outlook app and popped up on the outlook web app too. I guess she just sent it a little late and I really hadn't gotten an email for almost a week. IDK.

But yeah speaking of emails, I'm thinking of mostly abandoning this outlook account going forward. It's just way too overwhelming to clean up at this point. I have some important stuff in there, and I use my Microsoft account for a lot of things, so it's not like it will go away, but I think it's kind of hard to use it for anything important anymore. So I'll just keep it around and move what I think is important to folders as I find it again as I need it.

I've already signed up for a Proton account (the free version) because I wanted to use the VPN while I'm transferring files from my seedbox (and I needed a VPN that secures my whole connection and not just browser activity). I'm actually considering getting the premium version of Proton so I can have more VPN options (there are plenty of times I want to be able to select a specific server to access location-restricted content, like I was watching German television that required a German location recently using DuckDuckGo's VPN, and there's SO much stuff that Asian countries restrict, especially China, but often Japan and I consume a lot of Japanese content).

Proton Unlimited is only like $2 more per month that what I was paying for a VPN before, and it comes with all the benefits of the paid subscriptions to all the Proton services, plus bonus stuff for each. Like if you pay for just Mail Plus, you get 15GB storage, while Unlimited gives you 500GB. You get other benefits like more domain support, more addresses, etc. It would be really nice to be able to have an email specifically for thaao.net for example.

Unlimited also comes with a password manager, but I wouldn't use that, as I'd rather have my passwords stored locally than on a server that I have to access, and I already have KeePassXC set up for that.

But there's also cloud storage, which would be incredibly useful. I have given up on OneDrive because it's a huge pain and makes annoying changes to the default Windows file manager and only allows syncing with very specific directory paths, without even the ability to choose what subdirectories are synced, and the user/Documents library, for example, gets written to by software all the time by default (often without even notifying you or giving you the option not to do that) and then those get synced and take up space on OneDrive, etc.

500GB is also a lot of storage. I already have LAN sync set up to maintain simple things across my PC, phone, and laptop, like game notes, certain game saves, and the password database. But 500GB to store a lot of random media and stuff that I'm not using at the moment would be great. Of course, if you decide to unsubscribe, all that disappears, but freeing up space on the drive for a bit with easy access to it from anywhere would still be more convenient than lots of external harddrives for now.

I do want to move away from subscription services overall, and I've already canceled pretty much everything except Spotify. I do need to clean up the outlook inbox a little, because it got so full that I couldn't take in new emails, so I paid for a subscription for more storage instead of cleaning it up (lollll). But yeah, not subscribing to things means storing more things physically/locally. Constantly ripping my DVDs and physical games so I can play them without getting out the physical media and deleting the old ones when I need more disk space (plus I don't have regular access to an optical drive -- I have to get out an old laptop with one) is not really great, so having external drives would be nice... but having 500GB cloud storage would be convenient for a lot of things. Like if I was out at the hospital for an extended period of time and wanted to download some shows to watch that I had physically at home, I wouldn't be able to get it from an external drive there.

Overall I'd proabbly spend a LOT more immediately collecting physical media or even just physical drives to store stuff if I pirated it, but in the long-term I'd not spend as much as if I kept subscriptions for a long time, plus I'd have a LOT more control over the stuff I own.

But yeah, the VPN+Mail from Proton costs more than if I just bought the Unlimited bundle, and email and VPN are services I can't 'store locally' and would have to subscribe to anyway. I mean, there's tons of free emails, but stuff like custom domain support, encryption, etc. are not parts of those anyway. And getting the Unlimited is only a couple dollars more than my existing VPN, and the Proton VPN is the same price as that... I think a couple dollars for the email and cloud storage features is probably worth it. At worst I can downgrade those later.

But yeah it kinda sounds like I'm advertising the subscription but I'm more kinda trying to 'work out' if it's worth it, but mostly just convincing myself it's 'worth it' more than anything.

But yeah, all that aside, I'm able to write a post like this early in the day because Dens is actually doing much better today. Well, in the fact that he's nicer today. He seems so absolutely exhausted he can't do much of anything at all, but this also means he's not constantly pressuring and stressing himself, which is making him basically at his normal temperament, which is kind and sweet and thoughtful. I know it sounds bad when I talk about him at his worst, and I do use this space to rant about him, but he genuinely is a very nice guy and very good to me, he just has 0 healthy coping skills for when things get rough, and his unhealthy skills are almost all revolving around denial and projection, and that means I get to take all the damage.

But it makes sense, I guess. Our culture still doesn't value emotional intelligence or healthy care of the mind, especially for men, and it was way worse in his formative years in the 50s and 60s, and his personal experiences also led him to kind of be 'forced' into developing these unhealthy reactions to kind of emotionally survive. So I don't even think it's much his fault. These things are just a product of his social circumstances and not his own choices. The choice to develop healthy coping skills pretty much didn't even exist for him.

He's actually considering getting delivery pizza today, which is wild because he's been vehemently anti-delivery in the past because it costs more money, and he's super weird about money (even though we can easily afford delivery pizza as long as we're not doing it like every day lol). So he must be feeling pretty lethargic if he's even willing to do that hahaha. I just worry he'll refuse to tip the driver, so I might try to get him to let me order it and just pay him back for the tip. If he orders it himself, there'd be no convincing him of that. We got delivery groceries recently and he only wanted to pay 5% tip, and we didn't even order that much so it was a very small amount...

Hopefully he'll be up to having Little Ceasar's because it's super cheap and we usually will get 2 pizzas and that can last 2 days since we each only eat half a pizza each day. If we order anywhere else, we'll only be able to afford one pizza really. And having meals we can eat multiple days is extremely helpful right now as it reduces workload. Once I can put a little weight on my foot, I should be able to at least do some cooking, and that will life a huge burden off both of us.

Even though I keep 'swearing off' mobile games (or more particularly, crappy live-service games especially involving microtransactions), they're looking more tempting right now because concentration levels are now, and that easy dopamine is super appealing. I normally don't like to play these kinds of games unless I can start 'day one,' which means I at least have to wait for that... but the new BanG Dream! game is launching... sometime today. The in-game notification said 23:00, but it didn't specify time zone. It's a global server, though most focus seems to be in Asia, so it could be a popular Asian time zone, UTC, or the displayed time could be based on system/region time, so who knows what it means! If it is an Asian time zone, the game might actually be in service now lol.

I did try Girls Band Party1 a little, but I only tried it out for a little well after the initial release, and since I wasn't there day one, I couldn't really get into it. But it did seem cool. I honestly don't even know what Our Notes is, but I pre-registered for it on the Play Store lmao.

And speaking of mobile games, Sanrio Kawaii Me Live! (what's with all the exclamation points in the titles lol) got a release date for January. I gotta try ALL the Hello Kitty games lol, so I'll probably play that one. Historically, though, Hello Kitty/Sanrio mobile games have been pretty awful. I did like Miracle Match which was short-lived. Hello Kitty World 2 is something that I did like a lot, and didn't even really get addicted to -- I was perfectly fine just logging in now and then to mess with my park. Sadly, that is being hit with EOS soon. Maybe they'll make a 3rd game and I can play that from the start...??

It's rare that there's really a good mobile/freemium/liveservice game tbh. Premium live-service games that don't have a ton of commitment requirements are... OK, but I'd still rather not have the live service thing. Like Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has been a BLAST, but having to do the festas is so overwhelming. Even though it's like only once a month at most AND they just require like 2 or 3 hours of gameplay (though you only have a few days to do them, so it's STRESS). And because there's 'required' times to play, it makes me not want to play when there's nothing 'required' going on, even though I easily could have fun just playing it and working on the S-rank time trials or raising my World rank.

Similarly, I'd probably play a ton of PUMP It Up R!SE if it weren't for the live service aspect. Since playing anything at all in the game gives you experience toward season pass, it feels 'less productive' to play when I've completed the season pass, and so I just don't play it.

Anyway, now I'm kind of curious what kind of mobile games are on the horizon. I haven't really been following at all. There's a lot I know about, but since I stopped following, they may already have been released lol. It would be nice to kind of have one that doesn't feel like an all-day commitment or eventually devolve to a boring obligation... but they're kinda designed to be that way so I'm not really expecting to find something like that. Heartopia did feel really nice, and while there were a lot of daily requirements, none of them felt like a chore, and it was more just like being addicted to Animal Crossing or something.

Also, there's a sale on first-party Nintendo games right now on the eShop and I am so, so tempted to get SOMETHING. Like this kind of sale never happens? I have kinda wanted Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but it's a risky choice because I might not even enjoy it. Another Code: Recollection is one I really would love because I loved the DS game, and it also includes the Wii game that was Japan-exclusive and I never got to play it. And I have a bunch of other stuff on my wishlist as well.

Oh, maybe I could just play Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete since it would deliver that kind of mindless but addictive mobile game content but without the microtransactions. And I do have a pretty big save file on it (which I did spend a bit on during its live run), though I still have a lot to do.

I've also been thinking a lot about playing Pikmin recently. I have all 4 games on Switch, and I always want to play a "series playthrough" (I do this for everything) even though I've played the first one plenty of times, because it's one of the greatest games of all time IMO. I've never finished Pikmin 2 because the lack of a sense of urgency really turned me off, as you no longer have to think about resource and time management because you can just spend as much time as you want gathering resources until you have more than enough to accomplish the tasks you need to accomplish. And the resource and time management is the entire point of the game (at least to me).

But yeah, I'm still working on the Tamagotchi Plaza stuff that I talked about in the last post, so maybe I should just stick to that, lol.

Anyway, I'm kind of tired of writing and wanna go look up mobile game news now XD

Oh yeah, since I'll be browsing, I wanted to say I decided to stop using 3 browsers (kind of). I just use Brave for Microscape, Twitch, and Dreamwidth, which I always stay logged into, and LibreFox for everything else, only staying logged into stuff temporarily there. I do still use Zen but only for syncthing settings, so I don't even do anything online.

(Also, my Tamagotchi Smart just evolved and I ended up with Karapatchi, so I guess changing the room 5 times did NOT count as ordering from Tama Shopping... that means I'm going to have to intentionally break my toys or accessories in order to be able to buy more X_X very frustrating. I also should make a list of which adults I still need to raise, because having to cross-reference the natsuki icons I haven't gathered and the list of possible adults gets a bit tedious.)

Well, I talked to Dens this morning about the whole thing, and while he (in the moment) rejected the idea that he was being mean and just accused me of attacking him again, I think after some time to think about it, he's kind of realized that there was a problem and is at least attempting to be nicer, as well as avoiding pushing himself as much (at first he was already planning on doing a bunch of unnecessary things, like double-washing the dishes and making pancakes just because it 'sounds nice' etc.)

Part of it might just be that he's too exhausted to do anything or even be mean lol.

So things are a bit calmer at least... I send a message to my doctor asking about getting some temporary in-home care to see if maybe she had a referral or affiliate or something. It'll be easier to present the idea to him if I have more information to explain it with. I feel like he'll still just go do a Bing search for "care near me" and then click every scam link that appears and input his personal information, as this is... basically how he does everything, and will refuse to accept any sources or information I give because I "don't know how to look stuff up," but... at least the idea will be conveyed somehow.

While I sit around and do not a lot, I at least decided to play more with the tamas... I think I've fully retired the digis for now, but I did grab the Smart and Uni out of my drawer (I have two Unis, but I went with just the one I have the most progress in).

The Uni is a little annoying to "complete" as there are a lot of obnoxious Care Icons. There's one for giving 500 baths... I regularly would sit with it and just spam the bath command when I had some free time like in waiting rooms or whatever, and just when I was bored and not doing much with my hands, and I still only have like 300 baths... You also have to raise 100 tamas to adult and marry them off. 100. That's so many... There's also something like 500 or 1000 perfect games at the arcade, 54 accessories created (why 54 lol, they don't even need to be unique accessories? and there aren't 54 different DIYs in the game anyway...), and 10 ambulance calls. Ambulance is also quite annoying.

On top of the Care Icons, there are sets of DIY that can only be acquired during certain seasons, which means over a 3-month period each, so you'll have to play for over 9 months to collect them all. You can just change the system clock, but I don't like to do that XD

The Smart doesn't have a lot to it, tbh. There's only really the Natsuki Icons which are just for getting each adult. Actually, iirc, you have to keep each adult for a while. But that's it. There's of course collecting all the items and such, but I'm pretty sure I've already obtained 3 of every item.

The Smart touchscreen is pretty awful. It's small and embedded in the shell so it's quite hard to control exactly where you are pressing, and to change screens or move through menus you often have to swipe, which is hard because there's barely anywhere to even move your finger, and you have to move cleanly between two of the four screen quadrants, or it will not register (so swiping near the center of the screen will almost always fail, meaning you have to try to swipe near the edges where the edges themselves are getting in the way). Tapping to make a selection requires you to hold for a brief moment, because it doesn't want to accidentally register a tap when you're trying to start a swipe I guess, but this makes navigating menus quite tedious.

In the Smart, I'm going for Wawatchi, which requires me to make 6 care mistakes OR make 7+ care mistakes but order from Tama Shopping 5 or more times. I did change rooms 5 times, so hopefully that counts. I made sure to do the ones that cost money as well, if it matters (not sure). I can't really buy any items or accessories because I have a full amount of all of them already, and it won't let me. I'm not sure exactly how to get them to break, but I feel like I'd have to use them a ton of times, and doing so would raise affection and make getting the care mistakes harder.

For the Uni, I don't have any more adults I need to get, so it's just a matter of raising a tama over and over until I hit 100 adults married :,) I think I'm around 30 now.

I wrote this this morning and saved it as private, thinking I would add on more later, but I didn't, and now I don't know what I even want to add XD

So, foot still hurts a lot, getting weird mixed signals from Dens about how he is feeling about taking care of me while I can't walk lol. He sometimes acts like I'm being a huge burden (he bought these little brownies, and I asked him if next time he came to the back to go to the bathroom he could just bring me one, and he was like "what? you can't do it yourself? can't you just put it in your pocket?" etc etc and it's like... all you'd have to do is grab it and drop it off on your way ???? It's not that hard ??? meanwhile I can barely move and if I go from the kitchen to the office I have to jump on one foot the whole way across the house like...?????? But then other times he's like... happy and talking about how much he wants to help (while doing the help, so it's not just while I'm not asking for things lol) so IDEK.

Anyway, even though I did those long posts about Medarot and Shine Post, I ended up just playing Tokimeki Memorial lol. I'm playing the Switch remaster, which is pretty cool. I've only dabbled in it before to see what it was like but didn't really try to play it.

I've played this game plenty of times so I'm using some guides this time to understand hidden mechanics better. This whole time I've thought Mikihara's appearance was completely random (because other guides/information have said that) but I learned that it's actually not. Performing well in certain events actually increases a certain 'affection' level for her, and once it reaches a certain point, you're guaranteed to get her introduced to you at least by Valentine's Day. There's also a 50% chance it can happen at the Christmas party if you've reached this level, too, so if the xmas party happens before Valentine's once you've hit that point, you have an extra chance of it happening there. It's not possible to get her to that level by the first xmas party, though.

This is mostly for my reference, but the events that contribute to her affection points are:

• 1st place at field day


• Wandering the culture festival exhibits


• Winning a sports meet


• Scoring high on exams

I am not sure what the culture festival thing is, like... you always wander the exhibits? Maybe there are some with minigames, idk?? For the field day and sports meets, you have to get 1st, and for the exams you have to get "high rank" which is written as 上位 in the guide -- I'm pretty sure your character will actually use that term to refer to his ranking if you get that, and it doesn't have to be like 1st place or something. But probably very high...

It seems like the best course of action would be to join a sports club, as that will also help you train for field day while giving you opportunities to win sports meets. I tend to often play in a sports team anyway, because it's just fun getting to do the little meets and stuff, so I'll go for that. The exams are so hard, especially early on, that it's probably not productive to focus on those if you want to meet her as early as possible.

I'm pretty sure it's actually possible to meet her at the Christmas party without actually making it into the party. I am fairly confident that I've done this multiple times, as it feels weird because instead of being introduced by Shiori, she approaches you herself ??? Which is... very out of character.

There seems to be conflicting information about getting her ending, but the more believable information seems to be that you need a combination of 280 points across all the main stats other than athletics, so once meeting her, may be a good idea to ditch the sports practice and start working on other stuff.

The sports teams are mostly the same in how their command changes stats, but swim team seems to be a bit better than others -- it has fewer negative impacts on other stats and a better growth to will (though only slightly for these things). I also never really do swim club, so...? I'm gonna try it.

I started out and met Nijino like in early May... I've just been doing primarily swim practice, with a little bit of hanging with friends when the 'sensitivity' biorhythm thingy is high (but only on the weekdays).

There's no way to see your club experience points in the game, so you'd have to just count them yourself if you wanted to know where you are. When you have a meet, depending on the difference between the skill check and your actual stat, you can get different messages when you win or lose, but if you're 30 or more above the check or 30 or more below the check, it will always be the same message, so you'd have to fall within a certain range of 60 to even be able to use this method.

It does seem like, though, you might be able to put less work into the club and focus on other things at the same time rather than just spamming club activities. At least if you're just trying to get the victories in order to impress Mikihara. You only need 30 points in club experience by the 3rd week of June, and a single free day of practice gives you 6 points alone.

In fact, I might even start over tomorrow and try that, hahaha. For now, though, I'm super tired and going to go to bed.

So, today Dens's brother was here to help with the yardwork again, and I was just walking out to tell him something, and just... walking... normally... suddenly there was a big pop in my ankle and now my foot is super painful and I can't put any pressure on it at all :,)

I think it is related to peroneal tendons because most of the pain is on the outside part of my foot.

But yeah, I still need to call for the podiatry appointment (from before) so I'll just use that as a way to get this looked at as well...? The pain is in the same place so it might actually be the same thing, just now suddenly worse... I was going to do it today, but Dens's bro was here all day (like... seriously 5-6 hours...) and I don't want to call while he is here. I can't even really call well when Dens is around and on the other side of the house lol. I often have to shut myself in the closet to make a phone call.

Anyway, Dens's bro was here which makes Dens anxious, so he's been on-edge all day. Plus he is having a lot of pain in his shoulder and it's starting to give him headaches, too. The shoulder thing has been happening since he fell, which was in late April (I checked the date of a photo on my phone to figure out the date -- the photo is dated Apr 25, and I took it a day after the fall). Over the last month or so it's been getting worse, where he wears a heating pad regularly and asks for painkillers and opioids every 30 minutes (I'm not letting him have them that often). The last few days it's been giving him headaches and he keeps lying down and napping to sleep through the pain. Of course, he won't even schedule an appointment with primary care or anything. He says he is just going to wait until he sees his oncologist at the end of the month...?????? IDK.... There is no reasoning with him lol.

Anyway, then he didn't eat. Like at all. Well, just cookies here and there. I kept encouraging him to eat, listing all the different foods we had, even offering to make him stuff even though I can't use one foot lol. But he just... wouldn't, which is a common thing he does when stressed. And so he was just in a foul mood all day and was sort of taking it out on me, and didn't even want to say good night or anything.

And then Dens ran out of cigarettes today and is saying he's going to try driving tomorrow to go get them???????????? He hasn't driven in over 2 years and definitely is not in a good enough condition to be driving... plus he needs to have oxygen on and he would have a lot of struggle loading the tank and such so he would end up just choosing not to use it at all. Then be walking around and stuff where he could easily pass out.

So now I am extra stressed on top of the normal stress from suddenly not being able to walk X_X I am at least able to use Dens's old walker though, and I'm like hopping around on one foot while jerking it around. IDK, it works lol.

Yesterday I ordered a new monitor for my PC, and it's supposed to come tomorrow (really surprised Best Buy has free 2-day shipping??) and it's going to be hard to pick it up from the porch lol. It takes a bit to lift it into the house, and then we have raised 'landing' thing at the front door, so I'll have to get it down from there. It's not big or anything, but just awkward, and not being able to use a foot is going to make managing it easily. Dens can't really be bending or anything either and I don't really trust him to pick it up for me, because he's very likely to drop it. But also in my condition, I'll be likely to drop it as well...? Soooo idk lol.

Also my brother's wedding is coming up in like... 2 weeks. If this really is a dislocated tendon, it sounds like 2 weeks is the bare minimum I'll have to be completely off my foot, then it'll still be several more weeks of just light pressure before I can start thinking about normal activity again. Soooo uh who knows how that will go. But it will give me an excuse to not have to drive?? :D

But yeah. I'm too stressed to do anything really, and the pain is also distracting enough I can't really concentrate on anything even if I try.

Want to talk more about playing around with Linux but feeling exhausted just from typing this XD

(Oh, I did find Japanese closed captioning for the Pokemon anime, which might help with my watchthrough I abandoned lol. I think I might keep them turned off then just turn them on when I'm having trouble understanding something? I really need more listening practice anyway. A lot of times I can perfectly understood what is being said... if I can see it in writing. Not that I even can't understand them saying it, just that my brain can't process the speech fast enough to keep up with what's being said? But my reading speed is pretty good, plus if you stumble on a word or something, you can take a second to think about it before moving on, whereas with listening, the speech continues even if you miss a part, and then it all falls apart from there XD)

OK I am so so so so tired lmfao. But I'm going to talk about Medarot because I need to stay up for my sleep study (I'm doing it at home, but I want to wait til 1:30AM to go to sleep, as I'm supposed to stay as close to my 'regular schedule' as possible)

Oh, yeah, I got my foot checked out today... just by the pcp, she said probably a damaged nerve and not arthritis, but wants me to go to podiatrist... yay more calls and appointment-making :\ If it is a nerve thing, it'll take 4-6 weeks to heal, and I shouldn't be walking on it much. And if I do I'm supposed to wear supportive shoes uggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh

Anyway, I was all hyped to play Shine Post but then I saw something saying that Medarot S is getting a global version... uh I think I already posted about this??? But yeah, that was what got me into the idea of Medarot; I played the mobile game and it was really cool so I decided to look into the rest of the series to see if it was similar AND IT WAS which is great.

So kinda like the Shine Post post (heheheehe postpost) I'm going to kinda cover the basics of the game systems and post about my minimal progress in the first game for now. I'm playing on the uh... something something collection on the Switch (it has like the first 5 games and three spinoff games).

( 3 2 1 let it rip )

OK, so I wanna talk about Shine Post, but first a little update on me and the tamas:

( lil health update, and life on Vyvanse )

( tama update!! )

Alright, with that out of the way, let's talk about SHINE POST Be Your Idol! I don't know anything about the Shine Post franchise aside from this game, so this is gonna be about the game only.

( about raising sim genre )

ANYWAY, I'm just saying all this because Shine Post is a raising sim lmfao. And I got a little carried away. I originally bought this game because idols + it's made by Konami who also makes another great raising sim Tokimeki Memorial. I didn't really know what to expect, though...

( actually talking about shine post )

Anyway, I explain all this because I do want to start playing again, so I'm probably going to be posting about this more soon hahaha. I think I am going to start over yet again, because trying to jump back in where I was before is very hard, because you're juggling like a million things in your memory at once.

My mom seems to have kind of abandoned the whole German thing, or at least is taking a break, so I'm going to be much more lax with that, too. I have been seeking out some Japanese and Chinese dramas, and they're making me want to play Japanese games, too. Plus I feel sort of 'lost' without having at least one game I'm currently working on. So that will probably become Shine Post. I also started Pokemon Black on stream -- my first time streaming in months (which I streamed like ONCE then, too) and I kinda wanna continue that.

( health stuff )

In non-health news, I FINALLY got out paper and have been practicing 'drawing from the shoulder.' It already feels a lot more natural -- I thought it was going to take a while. I'm working on estimating proportions and angles in still life now, which drawing from life was something I just never bothered to try much in the past. I'm having fun though. I think I will also just do some basic doodling and sketching digitally too so I'm not JUST doing technical exercises or whatever. I mean, I'm enjoying it, but I think not actually doing 'fun drawing' will lead to burnout more quickly.

I've finished the intro to computer science course I was doing on KhanAcademy, and know a lot of neat surface-level stuff about how computers actually function and the structure of the Internet and its protocols. That's been cool. I also returned to doing the basic math courses. I finished 4th grade (I just had one unit left to do) and got through like half of 5th grade today. It's really interesting how much pedagogy has changed since the 90s, and how there are such different ways of just thinking about math and patterns and such now. Despite that the courses focus on basic principles for children, I'm actually learning new things. It's not so much that I'm learning about all-new concepts, but rather completely new perspectives with which to view them.

I also have been thinking a bit about the 'analog living' movement, which has been so quickly hijacked by capitalism and 'influencers' that it had lost its meaning before most people even heard of it, myself included. I do think there are some misguided messages floating around even within the sphere of people who 'get it,' but overall the basic tenets of mindfulness have spoken to me. I don't think practicing the core concepts of the movement actually require getting away from the Internet at all, but rather controlling how you use it.

So I definitely want to try to get away from algorithmic targeted feeds, for example. I decided to set up an RSS reader to follow certain things, and if I have to use a site in which there is a an algo-feed experience, I will try my best to ignore that part of it. Sadly, so many sites require you to sign in to an account just to view content on the platform, which I think is super gross, but I can still use an account there without having to succumb to the feed. Information from Reddit can be found through a search engine, or by going to a subreddit's main page and reading their wiki or masterpost or whatever. No need to scroll through random posts. X accounts display posts in order of time posted if you look at the specific account, so if I want to see something like, say, the Sonic Racing CrossWorlds monthly calendar, I can just go to that account's page around the beginning of the month and then leave.

I also want to spend time doing mindless socializing (or just reading other people's socializing) -- looking through a bunch of discord notifications just to see people posted yet another meme I don't understand or are talking about a topic I don't care about. I realize it's normal to mute most servers, but like... I'm thinking about just muting ALL of them lol.

And yeah, I just overall want to spend more time on myself and 'real' relationships and not this vague sense of belonging or on consuming junk content that I don't even enjoy. I also don't want to feel the constant need to 'produce,' which is outside of the scope of the whole analog lifestyle movement anyway, and do things that contribute simply to leisure or to self-improvement. Of course, I am fine with doing things that DO produce something, but the production itself is just not the main goal. I'm drawing to enjoy the process and even enjoy the finished drawings, but not because it 'produces' artwork. Importantly, I don't have to show it to anyone or 'prove' that I produced it. And if I do choose to share anything, it will be because I want to, not because I feel pressured to.

Well, ideally anyway.

Speaking of vague sense of belonging... I definitely feel like I don't really belong anywhere anymore...? Like besides with Dens of course. But I think a big part of these feeling is that throughout my life, I've been at the center of a social circle.

As a kid, I was the genius kid who got all the attention, best in the class, pampered and praised at home, whatever. Even though I probably wasn't the biggest influence socially with my peers, because of my academic prowess, I just felt important and influential.

As I moved into teen years, I suddenly lost hold of the whole 'gifted' thing, but I became the 'ringleader' of my friends. I had very little parental supervision or parental anything really, so my friends came to my place, and I decided what we did, and I pushed my interests on them, and somehow ended up with a group who just followed along.

College time was kind of a mix of both things -- I was the top student in my university program (and one of the top students in the country, brag brag) and so I was often the focus of attention, and the guy everyone came to for advice or whatever. In more focused groups, I still was usually the one making decisions and influencing others.

Even in working, I trended toward socially centric roles, like when I worked at TEAVANA, I was the visual manager, so I was always there, always training people, etc. As a substitute teacher of course you get attention from students all day, but I was a particularly popular teacher (which played a part in my demise, but that's for another day). I did art commissions and so of course I was the person people were coming to, and on FurAffnity you grow a little community that revolves around yourself in some instances.

After I quit working completely, I got more into streaming on Twitch and content creation on YouTube, where again, I was the center of attention, and the social circles that formed around this revolved around me.

Now that I barely stream anymore, I just... don't have that. I have social contacts but... I'm no longer the center of attention anywhere except in my one-on-one relationship with Dens. And I think not having that gives me a weird sense of being "outcast," even if I'm not really. Because there's something that was always there that is just gone now, and that's the only way my "feelings" want to interpret it or something. IDK what to even do about that, though. But sometimes it does feel frustrating and lonely.

Uh, I don't even know what I'm talking about at this point, so I'm just gonna go hahaha. I didn't get my drawing time in tonight because I was doing this X_X

(Also random but I feel like watching Bones lol)

A little rant lol.

So there is this old... saying thing in the autistic community that 'if you've met a person with autism, then you've met a person with autism' which... I super hate this saying not because I disagree with the intended meaning behind it, but because I feel it doesn't convey that meaning at all (or really any meaning, which is bizarre considering I feel autistic people tend to be quite literal with language and this is anything but).

Either way, this is still used today and even when people don't use that specific (stupid) phrasing, they still agree on the meaning behind it, and use it as one of the first things you tell to someone learning about autism: every autistic person is different and each autistic experience is unique. There's such a plethora of autistic traits and they manifest differently in every person where each person's situation is deemed to be unique to them. People have different needs and traits in different ways, and they don't 'link together' or anything. In short, the message is that if there is anything you should know about autism, it's that there are no defined "types" of autism.

Recently, though, I've been seeing people refer to things like "types" or "flavors" of autism and, of course, anything that talks about these things lumps people into groups that claim that they actually share a bunch of traits and experience them in the same way. This is... not a thing that's supported by modern autism research, of course.

The few cases where it IS based in medical research, it's referring to developmental patterns in children, and usually noted that these things are not even necessarily autistic traits but rather patterns that often occur in autistic children.

But the egregious ones that aren't related to that and talk about 'flavors' and things will lump other disorders and conditions with autism that are clearly defined as not being so even in the DSM-5. They also seem to often include really ridiculous things like "normal autism" (?!?!) or super outdated like "Asperger's Syndrome" in their list.

These things usually manifest as like 'educational' videos on YouTube or something, which I wouldn't be surprised if the scripts were just AI generated from 30-year-old information.

Not only are these things outright medically and scientifically inaccurate, but they also strongly reinforce the OPPOSITE to that one major thing that people feel is critical to understanding the autistic experience, and that is autistic experiences should never be lumped together. Just because some people experience certain things, doesn't mean they'll experience other things. None of it "goes together" into easily-defined -- or even loosely-defined -- "types" or "flavors."

I feel like the people who propagate this stuff tend to not be autistic and have little actual experience with autistic people or even behavioral health information. I think a lot of these "educational" videos were just information compiled with AI for clicks, and then it seeps into the general public because their ignorance is being replaced with misinformation. The person who made me think of all this is someone who is not autistic but once 'explained' to me that ADHD is a 'type' of autism which... even in these ridiculous "flavor" videos I don't think they make that stretch. So yeah, it's always shared by people who don't know what they're talking about. (I do think in this particular case, this person legitimately thinks the term 'neurodivergent' and 'autistic' mean the same thing, but they don't like to use the former word??? Which I can kind of understand this because there are some people who just use nd as a 'nice word' for autism, but in those cases, it means NOTHING other than autism, and then in other cases, other people use it as an umbrella term for a lot of different things which sometimes gets stretched so far to a level of overinclusivity that says just having anxiety makes you neurodivergent... so maybe this person also thinks that if you get nervous, you're suddenly becoming autistic and then get cured when you calm down? Makes as much sense as "flavors" or "types" so let's go with it.)

Anyway, all of this... sort of makes sense. People love to put things in 'neat' boxes, and especially when it means forcing human beings' personal experiences into those. And we all know how well that works out. Yet we all do it anyway. In this case, I think it's particularly dangerous and harmful, because assuming that an autistic person who experiences one thing is automatically going to experience all of the other things you assigned to their "flavor" is... not a thing that ever happens and is going to make reaching their support needs only that more difficult.

(Random thought: maybe autism flavors are neuro-astrology lmao. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if there's a small set of people out there 'identifying' with flavors and taking them seriously like people do with MBTI and astrology)

Anyway, speaking of support needs and labels, this brings me to... another somewhat problematic thing. Sometimes, we do need to define things or put things in boxes, for the sake of organization or whatever... and that usually means oversimplifying things, and it does come with problems, but usually those problems are not as bad as the problems caused by having no organization at all. But I really question if we even need to do this with autism.

In actual behavioral health circles, we now have "levels" of autism. Not long ago, it was common for autistic experiences to be explained with "functioning labels," that some people have "high function" and some people have "low function." As autism awareness grew and more autistic voices were being heard (rather than ignored in favor of organizations and parents speaking for them), we started to realize that these labels... really were more harmful than they were good. Because some people can "function" well in certain areas of life, but have poor "function" in other areas. And because of this, people labeled as "high functioning" would have difficulty receiving support where they needed it, and people labeled as "low functioning" would have their abilities minimized and stifled.

So we decided to replace those with... a system in which we define people by which needs they have. Which... as far as the problems it creates it's... making it so people in a certain level will have difficulty receiving support where they need it if it doesn't match their label, and people at higher levels will have their abilities minimized and stifled. It's... just Functioning Levels: The Remix. But for some reason, this is like way more socially acceptable. Maybe it's because we're just using different words now. Functioning levels became so well-hated that instead of thinking of why exactly it was causing problems, a lot of people just learned to hate the word because it was stigmatized. And now that we're not using that word, we're perfectly happy recreating the same problem again.

Autism diagnoses for some reason lean really heavily into social skills, despite the fact that autistic people usually need all kinds of support for other things and have all kinds of issues not related to anything social at all (though may introduce additional difficulties to socializing despite not being directly related to social skills). And this leaks into ASD levels -- despite the fact that they're supposed to revolve around the support needed, they tend to get diagnosed based on social ability.

Someone with extreme difficulty managing daily life and having a lot of various support needs is still likely to be categorized and even diagnosed with level 1 as long as they are good enough at talking and communicating. There actually is intended to be two separate level ratings, a social skills level and a 'repetitive behaviors' level. But in general society it's never talked about as such, and even in clinical diagnoses often will just be thrown into a single level.

This was a huge problem with the whole Asperger's thing (which had a lot of other problems outside of the scope of this rant), because the only difference between Asperger's and "normal" autism (as far as a clinical definition goes) was that people with Asperger's are verbal. That's it. The only difference. I don't know why we needed a whole diagnosis for that ONE trait, but still, that's how it worked. As you can imagine, this was even worse in practice than functioning labels, but then also created this culture of "Aspies" being the cute quirky fun ones with what was basically viewed as Autism Lite. Except you couldn't pay to upgrade to the full version and remove the ads... and gain the support you needed.

And even though the 'levels' labels are relatively new, most autistic people feel that their support needs don't correlate properly to the label they were given or diagnosed with, despite the fact that support needs are the core part of the labels to begin with. I do think it's quite a step above 'functioning labels' in that there's a 'middle ground' now that does, in theory, define that some people will have a "medium" amount of needs rather than needing little to no support or being completely and utterly disabled in every way. And technically there are two different criteria that get evaluated with their own levels even if this is largely ignored by the general public including those who need to provide accommodations and support, so it's a lot less restrictive...

But yeah, I think we really just need to drive home the narrative that autism is a spectrum, and support needs are going to vary greatly and need to be uniquely tailored to each individual, rather than lumped into groups where people are expected to share needs. I do recognize that the 'need levels' system does try to be intentionally vague so you can lump people more on 'vibes,' but in practice that kind of stuff doesn't work because now it's so loosely defined that it means practically nothing, and most people's minds don't like to stay open like that when it comes to labeling things. We like to create labels that say "this thing means ABCD," so when we hear D, we know ABC all come along with it no matter what. Without some amount of definition like this, we'd be unable to communicate with each other or understand the world at all. Pattern recognition and definition is crucial to being able to get by in the world at all.

Our brains are so keen on finding patterns that anything with two similarly-sized circles a certain distance from each other can easy look like "eyes" to us, despite it very clearly not being a face of any kind. We look up at clouds and see shapes and ideas in things that are just arbitrary clumps of water. Recognizing patterns is how we're able to experience the world in a reasonable way. And defining those patterns is how we're able to communicate with other people in a way that is actually meaningful.

But imagine if we tried to force additional definitions on these things -- as long as you see two dots on something that look like eyes, that means they are eyes and if you inspect them further, they are guaranteed to be a "face" and must include nose, mouth, etc. Obviously, that sounds ridiculous, as a rock with a couple lumps is not a face, and will not include those things... but we're using that mentality to group autistic people and using those groups to determine their support needs, and personally, I am not happy about it.

Do I have a solution? No. I mean, maybe we don't really need sub-diagnoses or levels of any kind? Or do we need them for some people to be taken more seriously? Maybe we need a complex system of 100 different level gradients that no one understands but better helps people get explicit support? I really don't know.